Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that Apple did not need NeXT, the company that provided the foundation for Mac OS X; he argues that System 7 wasn't nearly as bad as it was made out to be. Wozniak also says that Mac OS 9 was more secure than OS X is now: Mac OS X is built in Unix and is therefore more prone to attacks because people are familiar with the holes in Unix, explained Woznaik. "Some of the holes in Unix are well known. So keeping Firewalls on is more important. And we keep announcing, even our own security fixes, not as many as Microsoft but still we never really had those in the OS 9 days."

If you have ever seen any of those Copland builds "floating" around, as crash prone as they were, were beautiful, the ResEdit they shipped with it was functional and they had new resources/extentions thingys (<-- technical term) that I never quite figured out, kinda, maybe an OpenDoc modular model.

The OS 8 book sited above clears up a lot, it's quite through.

The programmers that built the Macintosh were artist
System 7 was a work of art.

What became Mac OS 7.6, 8.x (7.7) and 9,x, were the remnants of that failed attempt/experiment.
I'd really like to have seen what Copland could have become, that whole OS model was a revolution.